A
century on from the British suffrage campaign, feminists are still told
that being pleasing is the best strategy for their success – and it’s
still not true

Michelle SmithMonday 28 December 2015The new film Suffragette,
released in Australia on Boxing Day, begins with female activists
smashing London shop windows and bombing the partially completed home of
the chancellor of the exchequer. It dramatises the militant actions of
feminists from 1905 until the outbreak of the first world war, as they
sought the right for British women to vote.

Edwardian women appear
genteel in photographs, but the tactics of the suffragettes
transgressed feminine expectations of the era. Suffragettes disrupted
debate in parliament and struggled with police in violent marches. One
famously slashed a painting of a naked woman in the National Gallery and
another even came at Winston Churchill on a train platform with a
riding whip.

With England more than a decade behind New Zealand,
which had granted women’s suffrage in 1893, it was clear that polite
and reasoned requests for women’s political rights had not worked.
Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffrage movement, explained that
unruly activism was essential:

If
the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a
proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don’t intend that you should
be pleased.

Despite the sustained campaign,
full suffrage for women was not achieved until 1928. More than a century
on from the British suffrage campaign, the message that being pleasing
is not the optimal route to political and social change remains just as
pertinent.

Increasingly men are informing feminists that they would be more successful if they made their politics more palatable. The UN’s HeforShe
campaign, launched by the unthreatening Emma Watson, is often heralded
as a positive way to involve men in work toward gender equality.

Both
the idea that feminism needs to be appealing to men and that men should
be central to its progress are anti-feminist ideas in themselves.

Regardless
of their approach, feminists have always been characterised
unfavourably for their social goals, looks, and refusal to defer to men.

Mocking
cartoons of suffragettes showed them beating men to the ground with
umbrellas or standing over their husbands and forcing them to clean the
house. These caricatures took issue with the way that women’s demands
for the vote seemed to be upending the natural order in which men were
physically dominant and women were best suited to domestic work. Others
lampooned the unattractiveness of suffragettes: they were drawn as old,
dowdy and either lacking in teeth or suffering from pronounced
overbites.

WASHINGTON — The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen
have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital,
earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and
millions more in political candidates.

Moreover,
each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in
taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back.

With
inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate
rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher
taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a
sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their
fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a
high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax
activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers,
virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.

In
recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful
avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes,
including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and
the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune.

All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign.

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service
— the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the
government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind
of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

The
impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill
Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in
America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes,
according to I.R.S. data.
By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to
less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical
family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for
both groups.

The
ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,”
said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern
University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or
hundreds of millions in taxes.”

Some
of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most
generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the
hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans.

That might sound foreboding if not hyperbolic, but it's a serious and widespread problem
in the United States, where poor kids enter school already a year
behind the kids of wealthier parents. That deficit is among the largest
in the developed world, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to
narrow later in life.

This is one of the key takeaways from a new book about how United States is failing its children. The book, called Too Many Children Left Behind,
is written by Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, a long-time
researcher of poverty and inequality. And it will force almost anyone
to reflect on the impact of unchecked inequality on children.

Waldfogel
says the massive achievement gap in the United States is a blemish for a
country that aspires to be the greatest in the world. In her book, she
shows that achievement gap is pronounced to a startling degree in the
first years of life.

I spoke with Waldfogel to learn more
about how the early years of a child's life can impact the rest of it,
what role school plays in perpetuating inequality, and why the United
States isn't doing a great job of creating an equal playing field for
its children. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Robert ReichMonday, December 14, 2015The great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt. Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety.Start with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey.

The odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees. Two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any time.Many are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce – employed as needed, paid whatever they can get whenever they can get it.

Yet if they don’t keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or can’t pay for groceries or utilities, they’ll lose their footing.

The stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of middle-class whites are dropping.

According to research
by the recent Nobel-prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his
co-researcher Anne Case, middle-aged white men and women in the United
States have been dying earlier.

They’re poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide.

The
odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than
the odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San
Bernadino only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and
fragility.

The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason.

The lives of children from rich and poor American families look more different than ever before.

Well-off
families are ruled by calendars, with children enrolled in ballet,
soccer and after-school programs, according to a new Pew Research Center
survey. There are usually two parents, who spend a lot of time reading
to children and worrying about their anxiety levels and hectic
schedules.

In poor families, however, children tend to spend their
time at home or with extended family, the survey found. They are more
likely to grow up in neighborhoods that their parents say aren’t great
for raising children, and their parents worry about them getting shot,
beaten up or in trouble with the law.

The class differences in
child rearing are growing, researchers say — a symptom of widening
inequality with far-reaching consequences. Different upbringings set
children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions,
especially because education is strongly linked to earnings.

Children
grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum,
but not necessarily others.

“Early
childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s
long-term social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Sean F. Reardon,
professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford
University. “And because those influence educational success and later
earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow.”

The
cycle continues: Poorer parents have less time and fewer resources to
invest in their children, which can leave children less prepared for
school and work, which leads to lower earnings.

American
parents want similar things for their children, the Pew report and past
research have found: for them to be healthy and happy, honest and
ethical, caring and compassionate. There is no best parenting style or
philosophy, researchers say, and across income groups, 92 percent of
parents say they are doing a good job at raising their children.

Yet they are doing it quite differently.

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau,
whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book
“Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop
their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and
teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite
institutions.

Working-class
parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and
give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are
taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Being a woman isn't about embracing a social role or gender, gender,
gender. It is about being an adult female bodied person or being
assumed to be an adult female bodied person.

Glamour
is the stuff of the elite and overly privileged. Hunger Games
allegorically shows how the elites of the world treat the masses. The
working people do the menial work and fight the wars, the privileged
bask in their glamour. You don't have to be a Marxist or Tea Party prole
to see that one.

Despite
its female hero, The Hunger Games constantly depicts the conventional
trappings of femininity as decadent, weak and dangerous.

Noah BerlatskyNovember 30, 2015
In The Hunger Games,
the Capitol is the luxurious seat of evil. While the drab working class
in the districts toil in poverty and filth and boring clothes, Capitol
citizens stroll about in pampered splendour. President Snow raises white
perfumed roses. His populace is decked out in gaudily colored costumes,
preposterous coiffures and elaborately styled facial hair. The
upper-class, in short, is decadent – and decadence, in both Suzanne Collins’ books and the films, means flamboyant femininity.

Disgust
with, and hatred of femininity is often linked to hatred of women – as
in the uber-masculine James Bond novels, with their casual disdain for
the disposable sex objects who cross the hero’s path.The Hunger Games
doesn’t hate women, though. Its hero is a woman. But, as a woman, she
is a hero precisely because she rejects the traditional roles of
femininity. At home in District 12, Katniss wears utilitarian, drab
clothing. After her father dies, she steps into his role as provider and
hunter, leaving the confines of the domestic village for adventures in
the woods. When her sister is threatened, Katniss does the stereotypical
manly, heroic thing. You could certainly say her feelings for her
sister are maternal, but she expresses them most dramatically through
being iconically paternal – by going into battle to protect her family.

The
Hunger Games does put Katniss in female roles with some regularity –
but it invariably does so to emphasize those roles’ artificiality, and
her distance and discomfort with them. She wears a series of striking,
literally incendiary dresses, which in the films emphasise Jennifer
Lawrence’s considerable glamour. But, while Katniss admires these
dresses (and shares a bond of deep affection with designer Cinna), she’s
wearing them because she has to, not because she wants to. She has to
dress up first in order to win sponsors to help her during the Hunger Games
battle, and then to inspire the resistance against the capital. The
dresses are a performance. They function as a kind of drag, not an
expression of her own gender identity or choices.

Similarly,
Katniss’s romance plot is presented as a front. She and Peeta pretend to
be in love for the cameras to, again, woo sponsors and to assure
President Snow that their main interest is true love, not rebellion. The
wedding preparations are an elaborate ruse, which underlines Katniss’s
distance from the traditional feminine romance narrative. She doesn’t
want marriage and happily ever after; she is not that feminine
archetype. If she could, she would head for the woods.

QADIYA,
Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic
State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was
not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than
Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned
and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I
kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is
so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me
that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said
that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an
interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she
escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority
has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology
of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was
reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls
who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the
group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been
enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The
trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent
infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held,
viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated
fleet of buses used to transport them.

A
total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery,
including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And
the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from
deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and
dating is forbidden.

A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual
issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last
month. Repeatedly, the ISIS
leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran
and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to
elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial,
even virtuous.

Last
week, the National Women's Studies Association membership voted to
boycott Israel. The resolution reads, in part: "As feminist scholars,
activists, teachers, and public intellectuals . . . we cannot overlook
injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence,
perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the
colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during
the 1948 Nakba."

This vote is an utter betrayal of both reality and of women — especially women who live under Sharia law.

In
1970, I taught one of the first Women's Studies courses in the country.
What I had envisioned for the discipline has nothing to do with today's
anti-American, anti-Israel, post-colonial, faux-scholarly feminist
academy.

Marxism triumphed among radical feminists—and then they
became "Palestinianized." Women's Studies professors are less concerned
with the "occupation" of women's bodies world-wide than they are with
the alleged occupation of a country that has never existed: "Palestine."

So
I wasn't surprised that the association held a plenary panel last year
on that crucial feminist issue: "The Imperial Politics of Nation-States:
US, Israel, and Palestine." Panelists included former communist Angela
Davis, the recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize; Rebecca Vilkomerson, the
executive director of the infamous anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace;
and Dr. Islah Jad of Birzeit University, whose focus seems to be Palestinian women only.

They vowed to get the association to boycott Israel. Now they've succeeded.

But
these "Feminists for Palestine" are in denial about Islam's long and
ugly history of imperialism, colonialism, gender and religious
apartheid, anti-black racism, conversion via the sword, executions of
apostates and slavery.

The association doesn't condemn, for
example, the atrocities being practiced by Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram and
the Taliban against Muslim women, children and dissidents and against
Christian, Yazidi and Kurdish women whom ISIS has captured as sex
slaves.

Monday, December 7, 2015

A major study that undermines the damaging idea that male and female brains are fundamentally different could be a game-changer

Gina Rippon30 November 2015One
of the biggest barriers to equality is crumbling, thanks to a study
that blows away the misconception that male and female brains are
distinct.

Based on detailed and careful analysis of core features
seen in scans of more than 1400 female and male human brains, Israeli
researcher Daphna Joel and colleagues demonstrated that most are unique
mixes or “mosaics” of features previously thought to be either “male” or
“female”. A brain that is not a mix was found to be extremely rare.

The
result is a major challenge to the entrenched misconceptions typified
by the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” hokum. My hope is it
will be a game-changer for the 21st century.

Crucially, it means
the power of neuroimaging to explore and explain the links between brain
and behaviour can at last come into its own, freed from the constraints
of preconceived stereotypes. Our understanding of sex-related brain
differences will move beyond simple and outdated dichotomous thinking.

Knowing
the controversy associated with such declarations, the authors have
been very careful to use a range of different datasets from different
laboratories and to investigate the veracity of their findings using
more than a single neuroimaging measure.

Their paper adds to
similar discussions in neuroscience, as well as to the canon of recent
research findings that previously “well-established” sex differences in
brain structures turn out to be false when careful analytical techniques
are applied.

And it gels with the broader idea that the biology
of sex differences is not what we thought. A news feature in Nature last
year proclaimed: “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic”,
reporting data showing that, even in the most fundamental aspects of
sexual differentiation, including chromosomes, cells and genital
anatomy, thinking in simple male/female terms is no longer tenable.What’s
more, for several years, psychologists have been saying that, in terms
of cognitive skills and personality characteristics, the “two” sexes are
much more similar than different. Just knowing whether someone is male
or female is a very poor predictor of almost any kind of behaviour.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

It was ostensibly a book tour but I wanted to talk with conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.

I
intended to put into practice what I tell my students – that the best
way to learn is to talk with people who disagree you. I wanted to learn
from red America, and hoped they’d also learn a bit from me (and perhaps
also buy my book).

But something odd happened. It turned out that
many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with
much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them.

For example,
most condemned what they called “crony capitalism,” by which they mean
big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of
lobbying and campaign contributions.

I met with group of small
farmers in Missouri who were livid about growth of “factory farms” owned
and run by big corporations, that abused land and cattle, damaged the
environment, and ultimately harmed consumers.

They claimed giant
food processors were using their monopoly power to squeeze the farmers
dry, and the government was doing squat about it because of Big
Agriculture’s money.

I met in Cincinnati with Republican
small-business owners who are still hurting from the bursting of the
housing bubble and the bailout of Wall Street.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson